Radical Shadows Read online

  I REMEMBER a young man (a man who was still young) prevented from dying by death itself—and perhaps the error of injustice.

  The Allies had succeeded in gaining a foothold in French territory. The Germans, already beaten, were struggling in vain with a useless ferocity.

  In a large house (“the Castle,” it was called), there came a rather timid knock at the door. I know that the young man went to open up for the guests who were no doubt asking for help.

  This time there was screaming: “Everybody out!”

  A Nazi lieutenant, in a shamefully perfect French, ordered the oldest to come out first, then two young women.

  “Out, out!” This time he was screaming. The young man, however, did not try to run away, but slowly stepped forward, in an almost priestly manner. The lieutenant shook him, showed him some cartridges, some bullets. Manifestly, there had been combat, the land was a land at war.

  The lieutenant choked on a bizarre language, and brandishing the cartridges, the bullets and a grenade under the nose of the young man, already less young (one grew old quickly), he shouted distinctly: “See what you’ve come to now.”

  The Nazi lined up his men, in order to hit the human target according to the rules. The young man said: “Send my family back inside, at least.” So be it: his aunt (94 years old), his mother, who was younger, his sister and his sister-in-law, a long, slow procession, silent, as if everything were already finished.

  I know—do I know it—that the one at whom the Germans were aiming, awaiting only the final order, experienced at that moment an extraordinary feeling of lightness, a sort of beatitude (though it was in no way cheerful)—a sovereign elation? The encounter of death and of death?

  In his place, I will not attempt to analyze this feeling of lightness. Perhaps he was suddenly invincible. Dead—immortal. Ecstasy perhaps. Rather the feeling of compassion for humanity in its suffering, the happiness of being neither immortal nor eternal. From now on he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.

  At that instant—an abrupt return to the world—there burst forth the considerable noise of a nearby battle. The comrades of the maquis were trying to bring help to someone they knew was in danger. The lieutenant went away to find out what was happening. The Germans still stood at attention, prepared to remain thus in an immobility that stopped time.

  But at this point one of them approached and said, in a firm voice: “We, not Germans. Russians,” and, with a sort of laugh: “Vlassov army,” and he signaled to him to disappear.

  I believe that he went far away, still with the feeling of lightness, until he found himself in some distant woods, called “Bois des bruyères,” where he remained sheltered by the trees he knew well. It is in these dense woods that suddenly, and after how much time, he regained a sense of reality. There were fires everywhere, a continuous series of fires, all the farms were burning. A little later he learned that three young men, farmers’ sons, complete strangers to all combat and whose only fault was their youth, had been slain.

  Even the bloated horses, on the road and in the fields, attested to a war that had lasted long. In reality, how much time had been flowing away? When the lieutenant returned to discover that the young castle-dweller had disappeared, why wasn’t he driven by anger and rage to burn the Castle (immobile and majestic)? Because it was the Castle. On its facade was inscribed, like an indestructible memory, the date 1807. Was he cultivated enough to know that this was the famous year of Jena, when Napoleon, on his small gray horse, passed beneath the windows of Hegel, who recognized in him “the soul of the world,” as he wrote to a friend? A lie and a truth, for, as Hegel wrote to another friend, the French pillaged and ransacked his dwelling. But Hegel knew how to distinguish the empirical from the essential. In that year, 1944, the Nazi lieutenant had a respect and consideration for the Castle that the farms did not inspire. Nevertheless, they rummaged through everything. They took some money; in a room set apart, “the high chamber,” the lieutenant found some papers and a sort of thick manuscript—containing war plans perhaps. Finally he left. Everything was burning, except the Castle. The Lords of the land had been spared.

  This was no doubt when there began, for the young man, the torment of injustice. No more ecstasy; rather the feeling that he was alive only because, even in the eyes of the Russians, he belonged to a noble class.

  That’s what war was: for some, life, for others the cruelty of assassination.

  There remained, however, in the moment when the gunshot was suspended and could only be awaited, that feeling of lightness which I could never interpret: liberation from life? the opening of infinity? Neither happiness nor sorrow. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond—the not-beyond. I know, I imagine, that this irreducible feeling changed whatever existence remained for him. As if the death outside of him could only, from now on, come up against the death within him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”

  Later, after returning to Paris, he met with Malraux. The latter recounted to him that he had been taken prisoner (without being recognized), had succeeded in escaping, but had lost a manuscript in the process. “It was only some reflections on art, easily reconstructed, whereas a manuscript couldn’t be.” With the help of Paulhan he carried out investigations which could only come up empty.

  What does it matter. There remains simply the feeling of lightness, which is death itself, or, to say it more precisely: the instant of my death, insisting always from now on.

  Claus Peymann and Hermann Beil

  on Sulzwiese

  Thomas Bernhard

  —Translated from German by Gitta Honegger

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  I hate the theater with every fiber of my being

  I despise it like nothing else

  nothing is more repulsive to me

  but this is why I am totally consumed by it

  —Thomas Bernhard, Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of Pants and Takes Me to Lunch

  POET, PLAYWRIGHT, NOVELIST, THOMAS Bernhard was first and foremost a theater person, a Theaternarr with all the resonances of the German term: a theater fan, theater nut and a theatrical fool. Growing up in Salzburg, he couldn’t help but absorb from an early age the best and worst that the lavish summer festival had to offer: the absurd histrionics of an entire city turning itself into a stage; the selling of Mozart as Mozartkugel, or “Mozart-balls,” little chocolate balls with the composer’s profile on the wrapper; the annual spectacle of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Everyman in front of the historic cathedral on Domplatz or Cathedral Square, framed by exquisite baroque facades from where Death’s repeated calls for the dying Everyman would echo across the city in sync with the setting sun. Above all, there were the climactic experiences of legendary performances by the world’s greatest opera singers and actors. Their voices carried from the open-air festival theater up to the slopes of Mönchsberg where the adolescent Bernhard could listen free of charge.

  The unsparing repetitive drill of rehearsals driven by insatiable ambitions to reach superhuman levels of perfection against the terrifying odds of failure is the leitmotif throughout Bernhard’s writing. It also makes for the intrinsically performative structure of Bernhard’s texts. All his work is theatrical, including his prose in which Bernhard stages (and observes) himself in the act of writing. He is the consummate actor of his craft, the performer of his stand-in narrators who in turn reconstruct another character, usually a dead person, from his journal entries and remembered utterances. In the process of quoting, the first-person narrator also becomes the deceased’s impersonator.

  When read as texts in performance, the much-discussed (if not dreaded) darkness of Bernhard’s prose is animated, like Beckett’s, by the antics of human survival strategies in the face of death, strategies that are always rooted in performance.

  Claus Peymann and Hermann Beil on Sulzwiese is the third work in a trilogy of Dramolette (“dramalettes” being a term Bernhard coined for
his ten-minute or so one-act plays) about his long association with director Claus Peymann. The first, Claus Peymann Leaves Bochum and Goes to Vienna as Artistic Director of the Burgtheater, was commissioned by Peymann, then in his last season as artistic director of the Bochum Theater, for their staged farewell party. It shows Peymann and his secretary, Christiane Schneider, packing his suitcases with Bochum dramaturgs and actors, discarding others (some of them dead) and unpacking them at the Vienna Burgtheater. The second, Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of Pants and Takes Me to Lunch, was written for the 1986 special edition of Theater Heute, the leading German-language theater magazine. It highlights Peymann’s triumphant, if highly controversial, initial season at the Burgtheater. Peymann’s challenge to Bernhard that he write a “Welthammer”—a play that says it all, as it were—seems to foreshadow the public spectacle surrounding the opening of Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz, in 1988. The first publication in German of Claus Peymann and Hermann Beil on Sulzweise in 1987 in the German weekly Die Zeit took both Peymann and Beil by surprise. It marks the high point of their tenure in Vienna.

  The Peymann trilogy, published and produced under the general title of Claus Peymann kauft sich eine Hose und geht mit mir essen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), Claus Peymann Buys Himself a Pair of Pants and Takes me to Lunch, offers unique glimpses of Bernhard’s sense of humor at its most relaxed and affectionate. It is one of Bernhard’s rare public tributes to their long artistic relationship. This is the first appearance in English of any of the trilogy’s plays.

  In 1970, Peymann, then thirty-three, staged Bernhard’s first full-length play, Ein Fest für Boris (A Party for Boris), at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, one of Germany’s preeminent theaters. It was the beginning of a historic collaboration that was marked by public controversy, political scandals and definitive productions of Bernhard’s plays. Peymann went on to direct the world premieres of most of Bernhard’s plays, at the Salzburg festival (Der Ignorant under der Wahnsinnige, 1972; Am Ziel, 1981; Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, 1982; Der Theatermacher, 1985; Ritter, Dene, Voss, 1986) and in Stuttgart, where Peymann was artistic director from 1974-1980 (Der Präsident, 1975; Minetti, 1976; Immanuel Kant, 1978; Vor dem Ruhestand, 1979). He also directed Die Jagdgesellschaft for the Vienna Burgtheater in 1974. Stuttgart marked also the beginning of his long, continuous collaboration with dramaturg Hermann Beil who accompanied Peymann to Bochum. During their tenure at the Schauspielhaus Bochum (1979-1986) they developed what Theater Heute termed “das Modell eines Deutschen Stadttheaters”—the model of German city-theater (as opposed to the Nazi ideal of a National Theater). Peymann’s company and Peter Stein’s Berlin Schaubühne ensemble were the pathbreaking institutions that defined West German, if not German, language theater of the seventies and eighties. When Peymann became artistic director of Vienna’s Burgtheater in Fall 1986, with Hermann Beil as co-director, he brought with him some of their signature Bernhard productions and enshrined Bernhard as national playwright, much to the chagrin of his arch-enemies among Austria’s leading politicians. The hate campaign against Bernhard reached its climax in 1988 with Peymann’s production of Heldenplatz. The tide has meantime turned. Nearly ten years after his death, Bernhard has become an official, government-approved myth and national treasure.

  A final note. In Bernhard’s will, he prohibited all new productions of any of his plays in Austria. Understandable in view of his ambivalent relationship with Austria and his treatment by Austrian politicians, but unduly harsh toward Peymann, Bernhard’s characteristically contradictory final gesture might have anticipated the Austrian’s notorious finesse in besting legal obstacles. The Peymann trilogy had its successful premiere at the Akademietheater, the Burgtheater’s more intimate space, on September 30, 1998. The performance marked another farewell for Claus Peymann who is leaving the Burgtheater at the end of this season to begin his tenure as artistic director of the Berlin Ensemble.

  Music by Schubert from far away

  CLAUS PEYMANN, the artistic director of the Vienna Burgtheater, sits under a blooming linden tree and bites into a big cold Wiener schnitzel

  HERMANN BEIL, his associate artistic director and dramaturg, sits next to him. He unwraps an even bigger cold Wiener schnitzel and takes a bite

  The air is still

  BEIL (looks across the Danube all the way to Slovakia)

  PEYMANN (after a second bite from his schnitzel)

  The Tempest is what counts

  BEIL (after a second bite from his schnitzel)

  Naturally

  PEYMANN Don’t always say naturally Beil

  Nothing is natural

  The Tempest is the most unnatural

  all of Shakespeare is unnatural

  (suddenly agitated)

  and The Tempest is Shakespeare at his most unnatural

  Artificial all of it Beil

  all of Shakespeare’s artificial

  (bites into his schnitzel)

  More than anything I’d love to direct all of Shakespeare all at once

  and present it all in one evening

  one grand Shakespearean concentration Beil

  why not a total Shakespearean concentration

  if we squeeze all the plays of Shakespeare

  into one you understand what I am saying Beil

  take all of Shakespeare and make it one you understand

  squeeze all the characters of all of Shakespeare’s plays

  into one evening

  turn all the settings of Shakespeare’s plays

  into one single Shakespeare setting

  that would make a grand evening in the theater

  don’t you think so Beil

  The Tempest Richard III and II The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth etcetera etcetera

  that would be it

  (bites into his schnitzel)

  that’s what I envision

  BEIL (bites into his schnitzel and takes a sip from a bottle of Gumpoldskirchner which he has brought along)

  That’s what you envision

  PEYMANN Yes that’s what I envision

  this is not insanity Beil

  I can assure you

  I am dead serious

  all of Shakespeare in one evening

  and we’ll do the sonnets too

  the real drama is the sonnets

  The Tempest and Hamlet all at once

  and everything together no longer than five hours

  that would be the climax Beil

  You think this is an absurdity

  You don’t really think that this is an absurdity

  all of Shakespeare in one evening

  we’ve got the technology

  why do we have all this hi-tech equipment

  (bites into his schnitzel)

  The theater leads into one single dead end

  that’s where they all end up

  who’ve been looking for a way out all their lives

  the theater offers no way out

  except

  BEIL except

  PEYMANN except if we present all of Shakespeare

  in one evening

  now granted that this would mean one thousand eight hundred thirty-four

  people

  and needless to say only the top actors

  as performers Beil

  and as many sets as plays

  but built into each other Beil built into each other

  and we’ll perform this Shakespeare in all the languages

  in which Shakespeare’s been performed

  and one Viennese and one Prussian version

  and a National Socialist as well as a Zionist variant

  and don’t forget that there were

  Shakespeare productions even in Greenland

  and in Kirghiz dialect

  and also in Tyrolian Beil

  (bites into his schnitzel)

  If only I could stun the world even more

  stun the world stun the world stun the world that’s what it’s all abo
ut

  the theater is not going anywhere it is walking in place

  we’ve got to make something of the Burgtheater

  that no one else before us has ever made of it

  Thomas Bernhard thinks that the Burgtheater should be shut down for good

  on the next possible Ash Wednesday

  and on the following Good Thursday

  it should be encased in concrete as solemnly as possible

  for all eternity with all its actors

  directors and dramaturgs

  Thomas Bernhard thinks that the Burgtheater

  should be starved out

  in the most charming Austrian manner

  but he didn’t say what he meant exactly

  The Burgtheater could also be wrapped up

  and sent to Mongolia Federal Express

  with no return address of course

  He also said he could well imagine himself

  singlehandedly without another helping hand

  armed only with a basic twelve-point pickaxe

  hacking it into the ground

  so that all that’s left is a stinking pile of rubble

  with all its actors sitting on top of it

  naked and exposed

  reciting Shakespeare and Nestroy

  with such unbelievable dilettantism

  that eventually they would become such a public nuisance